Steam Market allowed for players to sell each other digital items, earned through things such as loot boxes, with Valve taking a 15% cut.Valve has recently introduced a limit to achievements to try to quell this behavior, but Greenlight has already been retired. Greenlight submitters would sometimes create hundreds and have their games drop them constantly to encourage players to green light and then purchase their games. Steam Trading Cards, a special set of collectables tied to achievements within game.Valve would retire Greenlight last year in favor of a direct submission process that led to such Valve-approved submissions as the aforementioned Active Shooter. The implementation of Steam Greenlight was meant to give games that might otherwise not survive on the still-new storefront, but within a year pulled back several of the restrictions that made way for people to purchase or take on baseline game assets for various game engines and slap them together for votes on Greenlight. One can even narrow down the focus and chart this trajectory: The impression Valve gives now is the same that they copped to in their recent statements that they are more interested in maintaining their large presence in the sales market than anything else. At least, the case that Valve stopped caring about games themselves. The argument that Valve stopped making games is not a new or unique one, but there is a modicum of truth to it. Steam stopped being about maintaining the games it hosted, and became about selling those games. Like other conveniences that evolve into juggernauts (think Amazon), Steam became a massive storefront. Over the years, Steam has evolved well beyond that, and the increasing bizarre behavior can be charted right alongside it. In its earliest years, Steam was only usable with games published by Valve and the client wasn’t required for use until Half-Life 2 released what was considered a bold move at the time. Valve’s goals with the platform were far more moderate: Steam was meant to be a solution to delivering game updates and protecting Valve’s games from piracy in a more convenient manner for its user base. When the first versions of Steam hit all the way back in 2002, its purpose and design was very different from the Steam of today. Put simply, Valve has finally tipped its hand and admitted the truth: They don’t care. In the place of curation or quality control, Valve plans on doubling down on its digital algorithm tools, leaving it to Steam users to indicate what they want to see and what they don’t want to see. Well, everything save for anything that, to quote Valve, illegal, or “straight up trolling.” To justify this, Valve uses what is effectively an augment that any action they may take towards a certain game is actually censoring ideas and all but actually use the phrase “slippery slope” in the post. In what appears to be an attempt to address some of these issues, earlier this month, Valve issued a blog post entitled “ Who Gets To Be On The Steam Store?” with the answer apparently being: everything. An example of one of the hundreds of games with low quality assets and strange descriptions that flood Steam. Such gems include a developer who tried to sue both a journalist and then Valve themselves, allowing a game onto the store with a title encouraging players to murder queer people, even, ignoring warnings of a massive vulnerability that forced the person who found it to upload “ Watch Paint Dry: The Game” using that vulnerability to get Valve to patch it. Those recent events are a part of a long line string of bizarre and sometimes horrifying incidents involving, and related to, Steam. Once mainstream press got a hold of the news, Valve had to pull the game. officers or an actual active shooter, approved and up for purchase, though not yet released. Only days later did people begin to notice Active Shooter, a game about playing as either S.W.A.T. Twenty-four hours later, Valve completely changed their minds. Within the past handful of weeks, Valve had told developers of some visual novel games that they had only two weeks to make sweeping changes to their games that had safely been on the platform they’d be removed while not specifying exactly what changes needed to be made. These days, it often feels like you can’t go near a conversation about Steam without encountering some sort of bizarre game release on the front page or major controversy. It’s impressive, especially considering the thing Valve is best at is shooting itself in the foot. From that identity came Steam, a platform for game delivery now synonymous with PC gaming. Community was a keyword in Valve’s growth into infallibility. Valve made its name among game fans as a quality developer with a focus on the people who actually played and enjoyed their games. That’s a mentality that’s permeated the PC gaming community for ages.
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